Friday, 27 January 2017

Without any doubt, the first half of the twentieth century counts among the most unstable and most violent times in European history. For survivors and Spätgeborene (“late-born”, i.e. the post-war generation) it was difficult to come to terms with the horrors of holocaust and war and to build a pluralistic and truly democratic society on the rubbles that the totalitarian Nazi regime left behind. As shows the much-acclaimed novel Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll, the German recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature of 1972, in the years or even decades immediately following World War II, most Germans preferred to push the memory of the Third Reich and their role in it into the background. With survival being the first priority, it was rather natural after all to focus on the present. But to forget the lessons of the past means to give those charismatic populists who wish to turn back time a chance to rise.

My choice of books followed my self-imposed rule of alternating female and male writers as well as classic and contemporary works. In addition, I fitted them into the Double Alphabet of Writers that I was filling up (male) and down (female) in 2016 (»»» see my challenge summary for Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks). The latter wasn’t always easy and in fact accounts for an unusually light read – The Restaurant of Love Regained by Ogawa Ito – an three instead of two male classics in my list.

None of the books that I picked disappointed me and there was no need to exchange any of them for another that I liked better. Admittedly, The Face of Another by Abe Kōbō turned out to be a rather difficult and confusing read, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. If urged to name my favourite Japanese reads of the past eight months, I waver between Silence by Endō Shūsaku and Black Rain by Ibuse Masuji although the school novels of Sumii Sué and Tsuboi Sakae have been rather enticing too and also Yoshimoto Banana’s and Nakamura Fuminori’s modern novels gave me great pleasure. In a nutshell: I loved what I read for this challenge!

And here’s now my summary list of the eight books that I read with links to my reviews:

Friday, 20 January 2017

It seems to be deeply rooted in human nature to put the strong and powerful on a pedestal for unconditional adoration and to push the weak and helpless down into the gutter to trample on just as unreservedly. Social history is full of examples of organised discrimination like slavery, the Indian caste system or less strict class structures. Japanese society is no exception. For centuries, the country knew different classes and religion justified their inequality with karma. Only in 1871 – after Japan was forced into dealing with Western civilisation – the lowest class called eta was renamed and given equal rights as commoners, but society didn’t change overnight. More than three decades later, the boy whose school years the first volume of The River With No Bridge by Sumii Sué relates has to learn that no matter how much he excels in his studies and in virtue, for people he’ll remain the filthy eta who should be avoided.

Wednesday, 18 January 2017

Three years ago I started into the blogging year with the last five of altogether 32 reviews for the European Reading Challenge 2013 hosted by Rose City Reader that closed on 31 January 2014 (»»»see my summary including a complete list of books reviewed or just read for it). My final effort to pay a reading visit to at least half of Europe’s fifty countries, took me first to Switzerland on the pages of the satirical classic Once a Greek by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Then it was the turn of the en-NOBEL-ed writers of 1909 and 2006 to show me their countries: I moved northwards to Sweden in the late nineteenth century with The Emperor of Portugallia by Selma Lagerlöf, before heading south to modern-day Turkey via Germany and sinking into the slippery world of Anatolian Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Afterwards I travelled to the Netherlands in the fierce grip of The Storm by Margriet de Moor from 1953 to the present. And my final destination was in the east of the continent, more precisely in Azerbaijan between 1914 and 1920, where I accompanied the lovers Ali and Nino by Kurban Said through the maze of religious, cultural and national traditions trying to keep them apart.

Friday, 13 January 2017

Many believe that until the break-through of photography painters did little more than depict what they, saw in reality or in imagination. In fact, even naturalistic pictures like portraits are the product of an idea that can include mysteries. Some are obvious and easily revealed knowing the code, i.e. the meaning of symbols, colours, composition, etc. in a given period, while others are hidden or inexplicable because their codes are lost and too subtle or time-bound to be cracked. Occasionally, the restauration of a painting exposes a secret that sheds new light on time, methods and mind of the artist like in the novel The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Nearly five hundred years after its creation the art restorer Julia discovers a hidden inscription in the painting of a chess game that turns it into an encrypted testimonial of a murder... and the reason for more crimes in Julia’s immediate surroundings.

Wednesday, 11 January 2017

To read the first work of a much adored writer can be either a revelation or more likely a deception, sometimes even a big one because not many succeed in producing outstanding literature already in the very first try. Writing like any other occupation needs practice. And experience of life usually isn’t a disadvantage, either. Quite a lot of the great men and women of literature that we know today saw their first novels (poems, short stories,…) rejected by publishers, often by more than just one, as show their biographies. In the Victorian age this wasn’t any different from today. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, never saw her first novel in print. The Professor was first published under her pen name Currer Bell in 1857, i.e. only two years after her premature death, and to this date it’s less widely read than her masterpieces Jane Eyre and Villette or even Shirley.

Monday, 9 January 2017

A Copse In Winter

(from The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems: 1821)

Shades though you're leafless, save the bramble-spear
Whose weather-beaten leaves, of purple stain,
In hardy stubbornness cling all the year
To their old thorns, till Spring buds new again;
Shades, still I love you better than the plain,
For here I find the earliest flowers that blow,
While on the bare blea bank do yet remain
Old winter's traces, little heaps of snow.
Beneath your ashen roots, primroses grow
From dead grass tufts and matted moss, once more;
Sweet beds of violets dare again be seen
In their deep purple pride; and, gay display'd,
The crow-flowers, creeping from the naked green,
Add early beauties to your sheltering shade.

Wednesday, 4 January 2017

Welcome in a new blogging year – my fifth already! It goes without saying that on the coming fifty-two Fridays you can look forward to many reviews of gorgeous books from the pens of famous and forgotten authors, half male and half female. During the past couple of weeks I made a long (not yet complete) list of reads to present to you and that I hope will meet your tastes too, not just mine. In addition, I picked a few new annual reading challenges to participate in that should make 2017 an even more diverse reading year than usual. Instead of making a sign-up post for each one of the five new ones, I decided to just write the following summary with links to the respective lists that will go online by and by. Moreover, I include an up-date for the ongoing reading challenges.